Thanks for taking the time to write. It might be helpful to post a few links or examples to your previous work and help us understand why they didn't succeed as you'd hoped.

Building a successful company is hard work (spoken as someone working on it, but not yet there), and in my limited experience, nothing has ever just "caught on." I'd suggest that the disparity between the frustration you've experienced attempting to build these companies and the frequency of articles proclaiming just the opposite is indicative of the problem: we want to believe that it's a cakewalk, that it's merely a combination of skill and luck.

What have you worked on, and where are you headed? Perhaps others who have been down similar paths may be able to offer some insight.